Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge;
Harvard UP. 1995.
[From the
Book cover]
In an
innovative and invigorating exploration of the complex relations between women
and the modern, Rita Felski challenges conventional male-centered theories of modernity.
She also calls into question those feminist perspectives that have either
demonized the modern as inherently patriarchal, or else assumed a simple
opposition between men's and women's experiences of the modern world.
Combining cultural history with cultural theory,
and focusing on the fin de siècle, Felski examines the gendered meanings of
such notions as nostalgia, consumption, feminine writing, the popular sublime,
evolution, revolution, and perversion. Her approach is comparative and interdisciplinary,
covering a wide variety of texts from the English, French, and German
traditions: sociological theory, realist and naturalist novels, decadent
literature, political essays and speeches, sexological discourse, and
sentimental popular fiction. Male and female writers from Simmel, Zola,
Sacher-Masoch, and Rachilde to Marie Corelli, Wilde, and Olive Schreiner come
under Felski's scrutiny as she exposes the varied and often contradictory
connections between femininity and modernity.
[Key Passages]
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Gender of the Modernity: “Modernity” … refers not simply to a substantive
range of sociohistorical phenomena—capitalism, bureaucracy, technological
development, and so on—but above all to particular (though often contradictory)
experiences of temporality and historical consciousness. . . . By linking
feminist theory to the analysis of different representations of temporality and
history, then, I hope to elucidate some of the ways in which femininity and
modernity have been brought into conjunction by both women and men. Gender, as my opening paragraph suggested,
reveals itself to be a central organizing metaphor in the construction of time.
(9-10)/ Modernity differs from other kinds of periodization in possessing a
normative as well as a descriptive dimension—one can be “for” or “against
modernity in a way that one cannot be for or against the Renaissance, for
example. The symbolic force of the term lies in its enunciation of a process of
differentiation, an act of separation from the past. (13)/ My analysis thus
begins with the assumption that modernity embraces a multidimensional array of
historical phenomena that cannot be prematurely synthesized into a unified
Zeitgeist. (15) The frisson of erotic transgression has, it seems, become a key
moment in the formation of modern subjectivity (174) Why, then, does sexuality
emerge as such a powerful symbol in the contestatory culture of the
avant-garde? What are the aesthetic and politics of perversion? Such a
phenomenon seems unimaginable without the prior sexualization of the human body
through the nineteenth-century development of biology, medicine, psychiatry,
sexology, demography, and eugenics. It is through such processes of discursive
mapping, as Michel Foucault and his followers have persuasively argued, that sexuality
emerges as a fundamental marker of identity and a key to the truth of the self.
The definitive contribution of Foucauldian theory has been to recast sexuality
as a fundamental category of modern culture rather than as in some sense
antithetical to it. Modernity in this account is equated with the initiation of
sexual heterogeneity, the implantaion of perversion through the multiplication
of discursive categories. “Modern society is perverse” insists Foucault; it
simultaneously creates, even as it pathologizes, a panoply of peripheral
sexualities. (175) Within these new topographies of the self, sexuality becomes
densely saturated with meanings as the ultimate, yet curiously enigmatic,
marker of identity. It indicates both an intensified individualism, through the
acknowledgement and simultaneous regulation of multiple and competing forms of
idiosyncratic desire, and the potential dissolution of the self, through the
mysterious subterranean workings of unconscious process and instinctual
impulses. (177)
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Fin de siècle:
With one or two exceptions, my corpus of texts is drafn from the period
1880-1914. The fin de siècle was a period in which conflicting attitudes to the
modern were staged with particular clarity, where invocations of decadence and
malaise were regularly interspersed with the rhetoric of progress and the
exhilarating sense of the birth of a new age. In this sense, of course, it is a
time which invites inevitable parallels with out own. It was also a period
which saw an increasing differentiation of discursive fields, as art became
increasingly self-conscious and aware of its own status as art at the same time
as such disciplines as sociology, psychology, and anthropology sought to
establish themselves as autonomous disciplines and scientific accounts of
reality. As a result, it was in the late nineteenth century that many competing
accounts of the modern received their first systematic articulation. Caught
between the still-powerful evolutionary and historicist models of the
nineteenth century and the emergent crises of language and subjectivity which
would shape the experimental art of the twentieth, the turn of the century
provide a rich textual field for tracking the ambiguities of modern. (30)
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Consumption and its disruption of public/private
spheres/ Creation of women as modern subjects: The expansion of consumerism in the latter half of the century
further blurred public/private distinctions, as middle-class women moved out
into the public spaces of the department store and the world of mass-produced
goods in turn invaded the interiority of the home. (19) To View modernity from
the standpoint of consumption rather than production is to effect a shift in
perspective which causes taken-for-granted phenomena to appear in a new light.
(61) In the late nineteenth century, the consumer was frequently represented as
a woman. In other words, the category of consumption situated femininity at the
heard of the modern in a way that the discourses of production and
rationalization examined previously did not. Thus consumption cut across the
private/public distinction that was frequently evoked to assign women to a
premodern sphere. (61) The emergence of a culture of comsumption helped to
shape new forms of subjectivity for women, whose intimate needs, desires, and
perceptions of self were mediated by public representations of commodities and
the gratifications that they promised. (62) Nevertheless, feminist theory
clearly needs to remain skeptical of a production/consumption dichotomy which
persistently devalues the latter as a passive and irrational activity. (63) 消費における女のagencyとはいったいなんなのだろう。 Women
has been seen as an object exchanged between men in a capitalist economy,
compelled to render herself as seductive as possible in order to attract the
gaze of the male buyer. . . But if women could be seen as objects of
consumption, some women were also becoming consuming subjects, as the advent of
mass production and distinctively modern retailing strategies began to
dramatically alter the everyday fabric of social relations between people and
things. (64) a new ethos of self-gratification (65) Depicted as the victim of
modernity, she is also its privileged agent; epitomizing the subjection of
women by the tyranny of capital, she simultaneously promotes the feminization
of society through a burgeoning materialism and hedonistic excess. (66)
Capitalismのエイジェントである女にエイジェンシーはあるのか。the celebration of production and the pathologization
of consumption (69) というのは問題ではあるのだけれど。消費と生産の関係はいったいなんなのだろう。the erorically driven nature of female consumption
(69) とはよくわかるのだけれど、これをどうtheorizeするかというのは大きな問題のような。a
euphoric loss of self through the surrender to an irrational cult of ideal
feminine beauty (70) erotic euphoria (70) Whereas Marxism tends to interpret
the consuming woman as simply the necessary by-product of a capitalist economy
increasingly oriented toward the stimulation of consumer demand, such accounts
fail to account for the particular and contradictory social meanings invested
in female desire. Yet to affirm such desire as authentically resistive of a
symbolic order based on patriarchal repression is to ignore the ways in which
consumer capitalism itself undermines such a logic of repression in its
production of an endlessly desiring subject. (88) Discourse of sexology was
ultimately enabling for women in acknowledging their status as desiring
subjects and hence conferring upon them a form of symbolic citizenship. (181)
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Consumption and death drive?: Apart from its ecomic meaning, consumption retains an
association with exhaustion, waste, and destruction, signaling a process
oriented toward the negation of matter and death. (76) これがある意味一番大きな可能性。消費をdeath driveと繋げる。In the novel, to
consume is indeed literally to destroy—the voracious female passion for
commodities not only undermines the authority of the male but brings about his
annihilation, and shakes the very foundations of the culture he represents.
(77) the libidinal chaos identified
with woman undermines the proper
operations of the capitalist economy, as enshrined in principles of
economic rationality, leading Nana’s lovers to incautious speculation,
bankruptcy, and even suicide. (77) If money possesses a latent psychic and
sexual meaning, the opposite is also true; economic metaphors were frequently
used to describe sexual activity in nineteenth-century texts. Within the
context of such a libidinal economy, Nana’s promiscuous coupling exemplifies
profligacy and waste, engendering an unstoppable flow of money, of semen, of
desire. (77) the symbolic affinity
between emerging serological definitions of polymorphous perversity and the new
focus on the pleasures and dangers of unrestrained consumption. (77) What
is ultimately most disturbing about this female desire is that it lacks an
object. (77) It is this indifference
toward money and what it can buy that embodies her greatest offense against a
traditional bourgeois ethos of respect for prosperity and the accumulation of
wealth. (78) Her contempt for money is simultaneously an expression of
disdain for the entire system of cultural values premised on the assumed
authority and prestige of traditional symbols of masculinity. (78) 資本主義のproper operationに逆らうものとしての消費？でも、いや、消費は資本主義に組み込まれているわけで。What is desired is not the object per se, but the
imaginary gratifications with which it is invested by the fantasizing subject.
. . . Within such a logic of desire, things in themselves are interchangeable,
and expendable; what is at issue is not the discrete particularity of the
object, but the symbolic meanings and generalized aura of desirability with
which the object-as-commodity is invested. (78)
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Use-value of literature: sentimental novel and porn “literature serves merely
as a means to stimulate sentimental and erotic fantasies” (83) In using
literature as a means to narcissistic gratification and loss of self, the
female reader denies its autonomy, collapsing the distinction between subject and
object, self and other text. The text is consumed metaphorically by analogy with the literal consumption of
objects such as food; it is used to satiate an appetite, incorporated, used up.
(86) Consumptionを食のメタファーで考えるとそれは体内化と一体化になるわけだけれど、たしかに（女の）消費というのはある種自己の拡大（自己愛というのは愛する対象との同化からくるわけで）に繋がる。やはりナルシシズムと消費のエロスというのは考えなければいけない。Simulate desirability (190) perversion is defined as
pleasure without function (201)
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Department store: The department store sold not just commodities but the very act of
consumption, transforming the mundane activity of shopping into a sensuous and
enjoyable experience for a bourgeois public. (67) In one sense, then, it
provided a model of an egalitarian modern space that in principle, if not in
practice, welcomed everyone through its open doors. At the same time, however,
this public domain presented itself as an extension of the private sphere,
providing the visitor with an experience of intimacy and pleasure intended to
reflect, in magnified form, the comforts of the bourgeois home. (68) If the
flaneur was a masculine symbol of freedom of movement within the public space
of the city, the department store, described by Benjamin as the flaneur’s last
haunt, gave wome a space in which they could wander and observe in a similar
manner. If the flaneur embodies the gaze of modernity which is both covetous
and erotic, then such a gaze was by no means limited to men, but emerged as a
determining feature of women’s voyeuristic relationship to the commodity. (70)
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Prostitutes and actresses—commodification of sexuality: Both seller and commodity, the prostitute was the
ultimate symbol of the commodification of eros, a disturbing example of the
ambiguous boundaries separating economics and sexuality, the rational and
irrational, the instrumental and the aesthetic. . . . Like the prostitute, the
actress could also be seen as a “figure of public pleasure,” whose deployment
of cosmetics and costumes bore witness to the artificial and commodified forms
of contemporary female sexuality. (19-20)
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The mechanical woman: Like the work of art, woman in the age of technological reproduction
is deprived of her aura; the effects of industry and technology thus help to
demystify the myth of femininity as a last remaining site of redemptive nature.
In this sense modernity serves to denaturalize and hence to destabilize the
notion of an essential, God-given, femaleness. (20) imperatives of biological
reproduction (20)
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Lesbians:
the figure of the lesbian came to function as an emblem of chic transgression,
allowing artists and writers to explore an enlarged range of pleasures and
subjectivities without necessarily challenging the traditional assumptions and
privileges of masculinity (21)
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George Simmel and femininity: “sociological flaneur” (37)/ Insisting that social
reality could no longer be grasped as an ordered totality, he sought to explore
the fluctuating and often fragmentary patterns and forms of modern experience.
This proclivity made him an object of criticism in his life time, but it has
rendered him highly attractive to a postmodern trend within present-day
cultural theory often skeptical of totalizing frameworks and strongly
interested in the aesthetic dimensions of modern society. (37) Simmel conceives
of an authentic and autonomous femininity existing beyond the bounds of
existing symbolic and institutional structures. . . . This yearning for the
feminine as emblematic of a nonalienated, nonfragmented identity is, I will
argue, a crucially important motif in the history of cultural representations
of the nature of modernity. Woman emerges in these discourses as an authentic
point of origin, a mythic referent untouched by the strictures of social and
symbolic mediation; she is a recurring symbol of the atemporal and asocial at
the very heart of the modern itself. . . . Within this tradition, nostalgia and
the feminine come together in the representation of a mythic plentitude,
against which is etched an overarching narrative of masculine development as
self-devision and existential loss. (37-38) For Simmel, as for Freud, the
female body signifies the originary birthplace, the familiar, yet enigmatic,
homeland from which the male subject has been irrevocably exiled. (41) Between
1890 and 1911, Simmel published about fifteen essays on such topics as female
culture, female psychology, the relationship between the sexes, and the German
women’s movement. (41) Much of Simmel’s work explores these simultaneously
liberating and depersonalizing aspects of modern life, as exemplified both in
the institutionalization of money as a general principle of exchange and in the
new and distinctive modes of experience engendered by the modern city. (42)/
This critique of the homogenizing imperative of modernity in turn caused Simmel
to query the efforts of some sections of the German women’s movement to achieve
political parity with men. Such an ideal, in Simmel’s view, would invariably
fall prey to a conceptual framework derived from male experience. Rather, he
insists, woman must be allowed to exist in and for her self, in her unique
particularity, and women’s distinctive psychological and social experiences
cannot be encompassed by resorting to generalized notions of equality. (45)
Production originates in a sense of lack, in the desire to struggle with and
transcend limitations, and women, for Simmel as for later theorists such as
Lacan, lack lack. Because they are already complete within themselves, women
have no desire to objectify their spirit in a permanent fashion through the
production of culture. . . This inclination toward reproduction rather than
production confirms women’s distance from a modern culture governed by a spirit
of constant innocation, whether exemplified in the rapidity of technological
development or in the creation of new forms and styles of art. (47) To put it
another way, woman does not need to create art because she is art. (48)
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Nostalgia for “Women”: In other words, while women were the classic objects
of nostalgic affection in their role as mothers, they were less likely to be
subject of it. Rather than desiring the past, they were the past; identified with the domestic sphere, they suffered
less frequently from a sense of homelessness and a longing for what had been
lost. (41) the nostalgia paradigm
(56) でも同時に、これってモダニティに限ったことではないのは、Adam and Eveの楽園喪失に明らかだけれど、なにがモダンかというと過去が女に代理表象されるということか。
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Bachofen’s Mother Right as a Yearning for “Archaic Femininity”:
Bachofen’s writings equated
matriarchy with a condition of homogeneity, materiality, and harmony with
nature, a primitive social order embodying a lost happiness. He explicitly
linked matriarchal prehistory to “childbearing motherhood”; both occupy a
similar position on the developmental scale as embodiments of the rule of
nature prior to the necessary alienation of culture. これはとてもおもしろいポイントで、人類学や社会学が想定したbefore civilizationとしてのmatriarchyというのは実はモダンの「過去」への欲望と切り結ばれている。これはフロイトにも通ずるところで、「失われた過去」を「失われたもの」として作り出すことによってモダンは自己を定義する。問題なのはそれが存在したか否かではなく、それからの差異化によってモダンが（そして近代的自我が）自身を規定する、というそのoperationなのである。drawing upon an
evolutionary schema which depicts the maternal as source or origin, a moment of
authentic harmony and unity prior to the fall into culture. (53) The key to an
autonomous femininity lies in the domain of the maternal as a zone prior to
cultural objectification and individuation. (53) だから実は進化論というのはモダニティにとって二重の意味で重要。ひとつはリニアーな時間軸で、それをモダニティは切り崩すわけだが、もうひとつは「過去」の創出。失われたものとしての「過去」を作り出したのが進化論なのだ。
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Psychoanalysis and sociology: Both sociology and psychoanalysis took shape at
roughly the same time; the period 1895-1015, when some of the most important
works of modern sociology were written, was also the time when Freud developed
the model of psychobiological development which would form the basis for all
his future writings. In spite of their differences of focus and emphasis, these
two disciplinary matrices thus reveal a strikingly similar employment of human
destiny moored in a distinctively gendered rhetoric. (54) これがわたしにとってのこの本のkey passageだな。このふたつの関係についてきちんと考えたことはなかったし、わたしの世紀末の関係はまさにここにあるように思われる。
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Women as “modern” subjects: Instead of being excluded by a masculine logic of
development, women were in fact addressed in specific and multifarious ways by
the culture of the fin de siècle, with such distinctively modern phenomena as
fashion, consumerism, and the department store being explicitly geared to the
desiring female subject. (57)
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“Camp sensibility”: the fin-de-siècle preoccupation with beauty and appearance made it
possible to eroticize masculinity by transforming it into spectacle in
previously unavailable ways. . . . The stylization and theatricality of
aestheticism, exemplified through a living of life “in quotation marks,” was
thus to become a defining feature of a “camp” sensibility associated with the
homosexual lifestyle of urban elites of the fin de siècle. (103) The aesthete
may be seen as voicing a heroic protest against the hypocrisy and rigidity of
bourgeois culture; viewed from another angle, however, this act of negation
bespeaks an aristocratic disdain toward everyone who does not form part of this
same bohemian style. (106) women and the masses merge as twin symbols of the
democratizing mediocrity of modern life, embodying a murky threat to the precarious
status and identity of the artist. Thus the aesthete’s playful subversion of
gender norms and adoption of feminine traits paradoxically reinforce his
distance from and superiority to women, whose nature renders them incapable of
this kind of free-floating semiotic mobility and aesthetic sophistication.
Gender as well as class hierarchies are maintained and reinforced through a
fastidious differentiation and classification of styles of consumption. (106)
If the aesthete and dandy shares with women his identity as consumer, it
becomes imperative for him to signal his superiority of taste and the
qualitative difference of his own aesthetic response. (106) In the act of
self-creation, the dandy denies his dependency on others, in particular on the
figure of the mother, the woman that he most abhors and fears. The dread of
emotional ties as embodying a potential threat to autonomous selfhood also
incorporates anxieties about sexuality and the body. (108) で、サドやマゾッホは実は肉体ではなく精神を扱っていると。これは至極妥当な見解。
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Fetishism and dematerialization of the body: The materiality of the naked female body is erased in
order to relocate erotic excitement in an exotic apparatus of whips, furs, and
elaborate costumes. . . . woman is aestheticized, and the threat of the natural
is thus negated by being turned into art; the female body is transformed into a
visually pleasing, play of surfaces and textures under the scrutiny of the male
gaze. (110) its innovative desire by fragmenting and disfiguring the female
sexual body (112) The male theorist’s fantasy of “becoming woman” is defined
and valorized in opposition to the naivete of feminist struggles for social
change; accused of either vulgar essentialism or phallic identification, real
women are, it appears, incapable of “becoming women” (113)でもこれは同時に女の側の欲望であるともとれる。消費欲望は、ある種のフェティシズムで、肉体を脱肉化する欲望であるとも。肉体のuse valueをなくすこと。それがある種の消費欲望？あ、なんか繋がりそう。ドラッグとも関係あるのだけれど、すでに女である存在は女に「なれ」ないというのは嘘だろう。
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Invocation of elsewhere (117) すてきな言葉だ
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Kitsch and the popular sublime (118-119) Peter Brooksのメロドラマ論を援用: such forms seek to familiarize the ungraspable, to
materialize the transcendent, thereby setting up a field of tension between the
otherworldiness they invoke and its depiction through familiar and established
conventions. (120)
[Comments]
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Simultaneous
development of sociology (also anthropology) and psychoanalysis has been an
interesting theme for me, but Felski’s suggestion that they share the
“nostalgia paradigm” was insightful. Here, modernity is defined as an operation
that creates the past as both something lost and feminine (both in matriarchy
in sociology and in pre-Oedipal phase in psychoanalysis), from which the
modern/the self differentiate itself in order to establish itself. In other
words, modernity is a creation of the lost past, regardless of whether it is
actually lost or not. Modernity is an operation of envisioning something lost;
from which it differentiate itself (so, like mourning). The past (women,
matriarchy, mother) is invoked/evoked to be mourned as something lost. Simmel
is a key figure here—money and women, economy and erotic economy.
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After delineating
such “nostalgia paradigm” that was predominant in various academic discourses
(sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis), Felski moves onto arguing that
women, though rendered as the “past” from which modernity differentiate itself
from, were in fact situated at the center of the modernity. Her argument of
modernity of women (femininity of modernity, when we see in light of the title
of the book) seems to lie in women’s act of consumption, wherein women bore role
of the privileged agent of capitalist economy and were endowed new forms of
subjectivity, namely, subjects of endless desire. In the act of consumption,
women became desiring subjects. Felski’s delineation of consumption is elusive.
While it is intuitively convincing that consumption has erotic valence (the
erotically driven nature of consumption), the question, for me, is how to
theorize the eroticism of conumption.
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One way to think
about erotic value of consumption is to contrast consumption and
production—even though Felski cautions against such a clear-cut dichotomy.
Especially important will be her reading of Nana, wherein she argues consumption
in association with exhaustion, waste, and destruction, signaling a process
oriented toward death. In one sense, women’s consumption creates a libidinal
chaos, which “undermines the proper operations of the capitalist economy” (. .
. but what is the proper operations of the capitalist economy, to begin with?) (77).
Can we think about consumption as a form of death drive, which undermines the pleasure
principle of production and increase of wealth? Must read Freud, after all.
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Also important
will be fetishism as dematerialization of female body, which Felski exclusively
associates with male authors such as Sade and Sacher-Masoch. But can’t we think
about this drive for dematerialization of body as a desire on the side of
women, too? By aesthetisizing their body (fashion—fetishism for parts), they de-naturalize
their body and deprive its use value (as procreating body).
